The melancholia that rears its head too often is reminiscent of those times and places that feel like closing down a sad tavern. It's that feeling of sticky hands, covered in dried, spill-over beer, a sense that you got a lot off your chest and that there still is nothing good to go home to. It might just be that there's no one good to go home to. It could be that there's less to life that you'd like to think and your performance has been lackluster. You wasted another night, but then again, it was the only place you felt like anchoring yourself in. Someone else could choose the songs on the jukebox and you could just slump with that sore back over that dim bar, giving off the look of being physically doubled over.

Iowa singer-songwriter Max Jury writes stories featuring people who are mostly tortured, but they never feel doomed. They are living the soggy lives of old country troubadours -- where the sun keeps rising, but it's mostly just to remind them that they've got to leave the bar and get some rest for the next night, where more heartache is sure to find them. They're dealing with soured love and heartless women, but all in a way that makes those women and that soured love still feel desirable and needed.